Companion Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Survey

Recent technological advancements in small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have led to the development of companion UAVs. Similar to conventional companion robots, companion UAVs have the potential to assist us in our daily lives and to help alleviating social loneliness issue. In contrast to ground companion robots, companion UAVs have the capability to fly and possess unique interaction characteristics. Our goals in this work are to have a bird's-eye view of the companion UAV works and to identify lessons learned and guidelines for the design of companion UAVs. We tackle two major challenges towards these goals, where we first use a coordinated way to gather top-quality human-drone interaction (HDI) papers from three sources, and then propose to use a perceptual map of UAVs to summarize current research efforts in HDI. While being simple, the proposed perceptual map can cover the efforts have been made to realize companion UAVs in a comprehensive manner and lead our discussion coherently. We also discuss patterns we noticed in the literature and some lessons learned throughout the review. In addition, we recommend several areas that are worth exploring and suggest a few guidelines to enhance HDI researches with companion UAVs.

Recent Developments in Aerial Robotics: A Survey and Prototypes Overview

In recent years, research and development in aerial robotics (i.e., unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs) has been growing at an unprecedented speed, and there is a need to summarize the background, latest developments, and trends of UAV research. Along with a general overview on the definition, types, categories, and topics of UAV, this work describes a systematic way to identify 1,318 high-quality UAV papers from more than thirty thousand that have been appeared in the top journals and conferences. On top of that, we provide a bird's-eye view of UAV research since 2001 by summarizing various statistical information, such as the year, type, and topic distribution of the UAV papers. We make our survey list public and believe that the list can not only help researchers identify, study, and compare their work, but is also useful for understanding research trends in the field. From our survey results, we find there are many types of UAV, and to the best of our knowledge, no literature has attempted to summarize all types in one place. With our survey list, we explain the types within our survey and outline the recent progress of each. We believe this summary can enhance readers' understanding on the UAVs and inspire researchers to propose new methods and new applications.